Striking a Balance

Striking a balance between Eco-tourism and developing the commercial aspect of town is going to be hard. Not un-doable, but just plain difficult. We need to attract folks to town to utilize our wonderful outdoors. Hopefully, they will stay the weekend and enjoy the other things we have to offer as well. And, by the same token, we need to attract the not-so-outdoorsy type to town as well so that can enjoy what we have here. Problem is besides a few shops, a few great restaurants, and OSV we don't have a bloomin' thing. Nothing to make one drive the extra miles to come here. We need something. Something no one else has, something that people will want to experience.

(Sigh)

There has been a lot written about eco-tourism. Canoes, kayaks, and hiking. It is all great stuff. We have a lot to offer. Eco-tourism is not crunchy granola tourism. It is outdoors related tourism. No need to give folks the option of washing their linens at the hotel to better serve this group as mentioned in a recent newspaper article. We don't offer that to fishermen, or boaters. Certainly not to fishermen.

We need to bring back our Main Street, and I think the first step in doing that is OSV and the Town of Sturbridge doing something remarkable with the Oliver Wight land on Route 20.

That's a start. Then we can work on the infrastructure. Go to the posting from a few days back, "Stream of Thought", and follow the links embedded in the post. One of them will tell how the town paid for improvements without having to raise taxes. It's well worth the read.

And, we need to keep the ideas flowing as to how best to use the Heins Land, and the OSV Land Purchase (there has got to a better name for this), and put those ideas in the laps of those on the committees and the selectmen.

In the meantime, I am going to finish reading the paper. I like this idea of having local papers delivered to ones house every week.

It's about time.